The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  Not all inventors and industrialists belonged to dissenting congregations, however, and insofar as there was a relation between the stylish blacks of the metropolis and the diverse blacks of the industrial towns, that connection must have been both broad and indirect. Some space in one’s thinking must be left for indeterminate and fugitive influences; and the visual tone of a society may reflect, obliquely, large material changes which weigh upon the consciousness. One thing that people will do with oppression is to turn it into style, and this has happened often in the history of the colour black. The severity of life in Inquisition-ridden, absolutist sixteenth-century Spain had turned to elegance in the tight black doublet with high tubular collar and tiny starched ruff, which compelled the Spanish gentry to be literally, rigidly, smartly stiff-necked. And in twentieth-century street culture the dashing use of black in punk, Goth and other styles is related by commentators, such as the theorist of subcultures Dick Hebdige, to the expression of anxiety and frustration.

  For the nineteenth century too some indirect influences may be traced. Certainly one could say that, following the American, French and Industrial revolutions, the new tone of society would not be set by the old aristocracy. And when Beau Brummell and the Prince Regent adopted black for eveningwear in the 1810s, their change of style may have been both intuitive and tactical: for chic attaches to success and power, which then increasingly lay with the new industrial money, spent frugally but not without ostentation by the new, often Calvinist ‘captains of industry’. The new money itself was managed by experts in finance and accounting, who wore – humbly or opulently – the black of clerical work, in the process giving more employment and wealth to black-clad lawyers. Bankers, and those lending capital at interest, already wore black. But none of these black prosperities could have increased as they did without the crucial rise of that vital new profession, the engineer. And engineers wore black, in imitation of the learned professions, as we see in daguerreotypes of Brunel standing in black beside black iron.

  There were other connections. For the colour black was also, and independently, associated with democracy, especially after the French Revolution in 1789. This may seem an odd connection, since black silks and velvets had earlier marked aristocracies and, in some nations, the monarchy. The plain black cloth worn by the priesthood, however, had been humble, not aristocratic – the colour most suited to sinful mankind. Speaking of Venice in the sixteenth century, Goethe had said, in his Theory of Colours, that ‘black was intended to remind the Venetian noblemen of republican equality’.32 Much the same could be said of the sober black style of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and the same is also true of American black, which was puritan in origin but came to be seen as democratic and republican after the Revolutionary War. And in each of these republics black was worn as much, or almost as much, by women as by men.

  Those leading the French Revolution did not mean to dress in black: they had fashions drawn up for universal clothing based on the tricolore, all red, white and blue. The tricolore styles did not take, however, and instead fashion moved to what was called ‘Engish black’, which came to be seen in France as distinctly republican. Baudelaire said of the black fashion in menswear that ‘a uniform livery of grief is a proof of equality’, and again that ‘the black frock-coat’ had its ‘political beauty, which is the expression of universal equality’. ‘English black’ itself had some association with the restraint of an emphatically constitutional – and bourgeois – monarchy. ‘Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy?’ Thomas Carlyle asked in his Latter-day Pamphlets of 1850.33

  Though not a republic – and afflicted with a landowning aristocracy – England illustrates the degree of democratic value which black had acquired. There was a widespread complaint that the general wearing of black made it harder to distinguish the ranks and roles of people. Charles Eastlake, whom I quoted before on the black and funereal style of dress, went on,

  Nor is this all, for many a host who entertains his friends at dinner has a butler behind his chair who is dressed precisely like himself. To add to this confusion, the clergyman who rises to say grace might, so far as his apparel goes, be mistaken for either.

  In Charles Reade’s novel Hard Cash (1863), a lady asks who has called while she was out, and is told by a young relative, ‘There was a young gentleman all in black. I think he was a clergyman – or a butler.’34

  Black had a levelling role. It is hard, though, to see English society, with its limited franchise and unlimited anxiety about social standing, as being precisely democratic. And behind the democratic association of black – and perhaps lying deeper – was again its association with the Christian Church. When Eastlake complains that the clergyman is dressed like the host and the butler, what he registers is that hosts and butlers had come to dress in the colour of the clergy – as had employers and employees in general. If black was democratic, even more it was Christian. England in the nineteenth century was marked by religious revivalism, among Catholics, High Churchmen, Methodists and non-conformists generally, all of whom had distinct black styles for their priesthoods and for their laity. It may be that one reason why England differed from so many European countries in its failure to have a revolution in the nineteenth century was because the Christian faith helped placate dissent. Even more than the newly confessional Catholicism, Calvinistic Protestantism encouraged each individual to be his own vigilant moral policeman who must seek, before all things, to be diligent in his duty.

  For the Christian Church, at this time, was no friend to social change. This has, of course, often been said, of the Church of England especially, with reference made to the 21 bishops who voted against the Reform Bill in 1831. How far English Protestantism might go in supporting an unequal status quo could be illustrated by the letter sent by the bishop of London – a century earlier, it is true – to slave-owning families in the colonies who were reluctant to allow their slaves to be converted, for fear that they might become unruly if they learned all men were equal in the eyes of God. They need not worry, the bishop explained, for

  Christianity . . . does not make the least Alteration in . . . the Duties which belong to Civil Relations . . . The Freedom which Christianity gives, is a Freedom from the Bondage of Sin and Satan . . . but as to their outward Condition, whatever that was before, whether bond or free, their being baptiz’d, and becoming Christians, makes no manner of Change in it . . . And so far is Christianity from discharging Men from the Duties of the Station and Condition in which it found them, that it lays them under stronger Obligations to perform those Duties with the greatest Diligence and Fidelity.35

  A Church and faith which had argued – as another bishop, George Berkeley, put it – that ‘Slaves would only become better Slaves by being Christians’ was more likely to reinforce than to upset a social order that was, in a more ordinary way, unequal.36 Nor, in the nineteenth century, were the dissenting churches necessarily less conservative. Jabez Bunting, the president of the Methodist Conference, supported ‘subordination and industry in the lower orders’ and is famous for saying ‘Methodism is as much opposed to democracy as it is to sin.’ He is famous also for supporting the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, even though their leader, George Loveless, was himself a Methodist preacher.37

  As a Methodist George Loveless wore black, as we can see in the engravings and daguerreotypes of him. For now he may represent the black worn by the very many good Christians in the nineteenth century who were at odds with church leaders, and who actively sought to improve British social arrangements.

  In the meantime many suffered in Christian patience and humility. The divided attitudes of the time are apparent in the fate of Stephen Blackpool, the ‘good’ working man in Dickens’s Hard Times, who refuses to join a trade union. Blackpool suffers a form of martyrdom when ‘sent to Coventry’ by his fellow workers, and a subterranean crucifixion when he falls down a mineshaft and lies alone, severely injured, for many
hours in the dark. He dies – movingly, Dickens always does death well – a saint of diligent, obedient, Christian selflessness, which shows in his refusal to complain too much:

  The bearers being now ready to carry him away, and the surgeon being anxious for his removal, those who had torches or lanterns, prepared to go in front of the litter. Before it was raised, and while they were arranging how to go, he said to Rachael, looking upward at the star: ‘Often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin’ on me down there in my trouble, I thowt it were the star as guided to Our Saviour’s home. I awmust think it be the very star!’ They lifted him up, and he was overjoyed to find that they were about to take him in the direction whither the star seemed to him to lead. ‘Rachael, beloved lass! Don’t let go my hand. We may walk toogether t’night, my dear!’ ‘I will hold thy hand, and keep beside thee, Stephen, all the way.’ ‘Bless thee! Will soombody be pleased to coover my face!’ They carried him very gently along the fields, and down the lanes, and over the wide landscape; Rachael always holding the hand in hers. Very few whispers broke the mournful silence. It was soon a funeral procession. The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor; and through humility, and sorrow, and forgiveness, he had gone to his Redeemer’s rest.38

  FOR BEHIND THE industrial association, and the democratic association, and the Christian association, was the oldest association: of the colour black with death. The sense of it was often voiced, and often with dismay. Alfred de Musset said in 1836 ‘that vestment of black which the men of our time wear is a terrible symbol . . . Human reason . . . bears in itself sorrow’. Balzac said, ‘we are all dressed in black, like so many people in mourning’. Charles Eastlake had wondered why men wore, at festivities, the dress of death; as had Henry Mayhew, who also observed that ‘a gentleman . . . attired for the gayest evening party, would . . . be equally presentable at the most sorrowful funeral.’39

  One must ask, finally, whether the century’s festive blacks were in part an oblique reflection of a familiarity with death. Death was certainly a growing fact, since mortality increased directly with the expansion of the unsanitary cities, and – in spite of medical advances – refused to decline in the middle decades of the century. Death truly was a leveller, since the successive epidemics of cholera and typhoid killed the rich with the poor, and in 1861 killed Prince Albert. Death was also a large fact in the art, and fiction, of the time. Dickens was celebrated at once for his comedy and for the power of his deathbed scenes, while Thackeray famously ended a chapter in the middle of Vanity Fair with a picture of his heroine Amelia ‘praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart’.40

  In painting, too, death was popular, and was the centrepiece of the popular genre of history painting. In the public art galleries – themselves an innovation of the nineteenth century – crowds flocked to emote at deaths that were naval (Nelson, by West, 1806, by Devis, 1807, by Maclise, 1859–64), military-imperial (Gordon, by Joy, 1885), literary (Chatterton, by Wallis, 1856), historical-factual (Lady Jane Grey, by Delaroche, 1833), historical-exotic (Sardanapalus, by Delacroix, 1827) and classical (Caesar, by Camuccini, 1798, and by Gérôme, 1867) – to name a delegation. Spectators were moved to tears by depictions of the deaths of the unknown sick, the unknown poor, and unknown children. The living were painted contemplating the dead (Cromwell gazing at Charles I in his coffin, by Delaroche, 1831), fathers were painted (or engraved) beside their dead daughters (Tintoretto by Cogniet, c. 1857, and by O’Neill, 1873, King Lear by Barry, 1786–8, by Romney, 1775–7, by Pecht, 1876).

  In many paintings, the quality black of the century’s smart style joins with the descending shadows of death. In The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) by Paul Delaroche, the grieving lady by the wall wears a rich black velvet dress which merges with the jet-black shadow on the wall, while the executioner seems half a dandy, smartly sporting black with red – the colours of death and bloodshed (illus. 86). The enormous black cloak worn by the elderly man who comforts Jane – Baron Chandos – is not a mourning gown, but a grand velvet robe of state. Lady Jane herself wears white satin, as fine ladies did in the nineteenth century (as also in the sixteenth), so the tragedy of her cruel death is represented at once in the absolute good and bad of white and black, and in the smart two-colour contrast of nineteenth-century civility.

  Again, in Millais’s painting of the Princes in the Tower of 1878, the doomed children are dressed in sumptuous jet-black velvet (illus. 87). Because they are tragic victims Millais has made them beautiful, with a fair, northern European beauty. They seem beautiful boys except that they could equally be beautiful girls – or a couple, and then it would be anyone’s guess as to how one reads the genders. The black clothes they wear look like mourning black, worn because, with a painter’s poetry, they are in anticipatory mourning for themselves. But it is also smart black – the smartest, with a lustrous beauty which is at once medieval-princely and upper-class Victorian. And still, for all its luxurious stylishness, their black is also tragic. For youthful mortality was high in the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth, whether one died in an urban epidemic or of some disease in the colony where one’s parents had been stationed.

  Although the nineteenth century was indeed familiar with death, however, it does not seem that – away from actual interments – death was found disheartening, but rather the reverse. In literary studies, reading great tragedies, one is accustomed to think of vicarious dying as an enlarging and heartening experience. And away from formal tragedy this may again be true. It does seem that life draws strength from a close approach to death, quite apart from the consolations of religion. And if the nineteenth century had a culture of death, which is reflected at a distance in its fine black style, that culture evidently worked with a positive effect. As to the history of the colour black, it is a fact that widespread fashions for wearing black, together with an extravagant culture of death, have arisen not when nations suffered defeat, but when they were at their high point of international power. This is true of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, Spain and also Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Holland in the seventeenth century, and England not only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but again and above all in the nineteenth century. It is not that nations never look sombre when things go badly; nor are all empires dark at their high point. Both France and Austro-Hungary were lighter in tone (and both often dressed their soldiers in white). But still it is true that black fashions and the cult of death have accompanied extremes of wealth and power. There are obvious connections one could make – for instance with the cost in lives that buys international power. But perhaps one should allow an element of mystery to the connection there may be, both between death and the enhancement of life, and between death, power, the colour black and triumphal festive socialization.

  86 Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833, oil on canvas.

  87 John Everett Millais, The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower, 1483, 1878, oil on canvas.

  That connection is visible in the culture of the funeral when nations are at their greatest. For the funeral of Nelson in January 1806, the black coffin was mounted on a royal barge beneath a black canopy crowned with black ostrich feathers, and progressed with 60 ships, many decorated or draped with black, from Greenwich to Whitehall. The next day the coffin was mounted on a funeral ‘car’ shaped like his ship the Victory, all black and draped with black, again with a black canopy crowned with black feathers. All London watched the procession from Whitehall to Saint Paul’s, where the funeral service lasted four hours. Horatio Nelson was then laid to rest, and rests still, in the crypt of St Paul’s, in a massive sarcophagus of black marble (which had originally been made for Cardinal Wolsey).

  Grand as Nelson’s funeral was, it cannot compare, as a communal event, with the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. Arthur Wellesley, the Iron Duke, a victor of Waterloo and ex-prime minister, died of a seizure at the age of 83 at Wal
mer Castle in Kent. Suitable to his military prowess, ‘his medical attendants . . . were surprised at the great development of strength and muscle exhibited by his body even at the period of his death’. As was usual with the better class of death, the body was laid in a lead casket, which was placed in a coffin ‘of the finest polished mahogany’. This in turn was covered ‘after the fashion of royalty’ with crimson velvet, with the handles and decorations richly gilt; a massive pall of black velvet was rested upon it, but pulled back for visitors.41